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NEWS
All-time record for SUV sales
Australian market juggernaut running roughshod over the top of passenger carsBuyers in our wide, brown land bought SUVs last year in unprecedented numbers, the FCAI has reported.
According to VFACTS figures, passenger vehicle sales in 2014 accounted for 47.8 per cent of the market – down from the 49.9 per cent share of 2013. That's due almost entirely to the rise of the SUV in driveways around the nation.
Since 2007, as Toyota's Tony Cramb stated during a market wrap for journalists earlier in the week, the percentage of SUV sales has risen from 18.9 per cent to 31.7 per cent last year. That equates to 352,347 SUVs in the 1.1 million-strong market for 2014.
And further illustrating how fast SUVs have taken hold in Australia, the 18.9 per cent share in 2007 accounted for 198,176 sales.
"This is at the expense of passenger car sales," said Cramb, Toyota Australia's Executive Director of Sales and Marketing.
"Last year, Australians bought a hundred thousand fewer passenger cars than they did in the peak year of 2007. Over the same period, SUV sales have grown by more than 150,000 sales. In 2007, passenger cars were more than 60 per cent of the market – and SUVs had not reached 20 per cent."
The numbers for passenger cars have declined from 637,019 in 2007 to 531,596 for 2014 – in a market that was over 63,000 units stronger than in 2007.
While it's generally recognised that SUVs are the defacto family cars of the 21st Century, it's not just families that have fallen for the SUV's appeal. Market share has been eroded for large and medium passenger cars, as a consequence of the shift in consumer sentiment to SUVs, but even small and light passenger cars – previously thought impervious to SUVs – are losing market share.
The relatively new micro car segment has dropped from 22,874 sales in 2013 to 15,828 just last year. That's probably due more to market saturation for the limited circle of buyers than SUV conquests, but in the light and small car segments sales slid by around 5000 units for the light segment, and by roughly 10,000 units for small cars. In contrast, small SUVs picked up about 12,000 new sales, year on year from 2013.
Close to 2000 of those extra sales in small SUVs came from the Ford EcoSport, and over 4300 for the Holden Trax, in its first full year on sale in 2014. Mitsubishi's ASX and the Nissan Qashqai also added around 3000 units each. It's clear that the small SUV segment is beginning to boom, and five or six years from now it will likely be the default choice for small families and young couples.
It serves to explain why Toyota is interested in importing the production version of the C-HR show car (pictured) when it becomes available as a production model.
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Written byKen Gratton
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